The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. That is the first move. We flinch at a stroke aimed at someone else's arm. We twist our own bodies watching a slack-rope dancer, as if our balance could keep him up. Imagination is doing the work the senses cannot. Adam Smith published The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759, seventeen years before The Wealth of Nations, and spent the rest of his life revising it through six editions. He told friends this was the more important book. The argument is that moral life does not start with a rule. It starts with an act of placing yourself in a case that is not yours.

The spectator is whoever tries to feel a situation he cannot inhabit. The person principally concerned is the sufferer or the agent whose passion we are asked to enter. The impartial spectator is the imagined fair witness we slowly install as conscience: a judge who knows our motives and will not take our side because we asked. The rich man collects our sympathy without earning it. The poor man stands in a crowd and remains as obscure as if he were shut in his hovel. The poor man's son spends a life toiling for palaces and retinues, then finds in old age that wealth is an enormous machine no better than a tweezer-case. The pressure among them is not a debate about whether we are selfish. It is whether the same imagination that flinches at a stranger's pain will keep flinching when the stranger is poor, or when our own interest is on the table.

Chapter 1 names sympathy as fellow-feeling with any passion, not pity, and insists it arises from the situation more than from the face. We approve feelings that match what we imagine we would feel, and we lower our own grief or anger to a pitch another person can enter. That trained spectator turns inward. We divide ourselves into two persons and pass sentence on the one who acted. The hinge is the corruption Smith will not soften. Because we enter joy more easily than misery, we parade riches, hide poverty, and learn to admire rank as if it were virtue. Justice, which may be extracted by force, is the pillar that keeps a society standing even among merchants who feel no love. Beneficence cannot be extorted; its absence disappoints, but it does not dissolve the house. Fortune then bends desert. We curse the stone that hurts us, praise the friend whose request succeeded, and punish the crime that landed while the same intention, failing, looks lighter. Nature, Smith says, planted that irregularity so courts would not become inquisitions of wishes.

Smith is not writing a preface to markets, and he is not writing a sermon against wanting things. He is writing a moral psychology for a commercial society that will later get an economics. Later chapters keep adding how utility charms the eye: we rearrange chairs for an order we could ignore, buy a precise watch while remaining unpunctual, and chase a machine of wealth whose beauty we confuse with happiness. The ending does not crown a theory of the moral sense. It tests other systems, including Hutcheson's, and leaves the work of judgment with sympathy refined by an impartial spectator, not with a special faculty that sees virtue the way the eye sees color.

Sympathy that can inhabit a brother's rack is Developing Moral Imagination, then the slack rope, then the blush we feel for a man who feels none. Distinguishing Self-Interest from Selfishness is the claim that every man is first recommended to his own care, set beside the miser and the cheat who use the same language. Cultivating the Impartial Spectator is the split into two persons, the remorse that arrives when nobody saw, and the general rules that hold when passion wants an exception. Recognizing Moral Corruption by Wealth is the poor man unheeded in a crowd, the toil whose end is a neighbor's admiration, and the worship of rank Smith calls the most universal cause of corrupted sentiment. Separating Justice from Beneficence is the pillar and the ornament: a society of merchants can stand without kindness and cannot stand once they start injuring one another. Holding Intentions Against Outcomes is the plank that saved a sailor, the office the friend failed to get, and the warning that if we punished wishes as we punish deeds, innocence would have no safety.

A crowd at a slack rope still twists to keep a stranger up. A poor man's son still spends a life buying a machine that will not rest. Wide Reads keeps summaries, quotes, and audio on all thirty-nine chapters, from a brother on the rack our senses cannot reach to a tweezer-case that turns out to have been enough.